Tuesday, 20 February 2018

Blundering Into A Hot War

ISIS may have retreated to the insurgent fringes of Syrian
life, but the chaos and the conflict in Syria show no sign of approaching a
resolution. If anything, it looks more chaotic now than before, when ISIS, as
the enemy of both Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government and the US-led coalition,
provided a common enemy.

And now? The conflict still rages, but more
chaotically, more confusingly.

Yet
it’s a chaos with definite shapes emerging, a chaos out of which is emerging
ever clearer and often overlapping lines of conflict, between proxy forces, and
between their international backers, sometimes alongside each other, sometimes
against each other.

The fatally internationalised nature of the Syrian
conflict, dragging myriad external actors into play, is no longer latent; it is
manifest, and it is dangerous, lacking geopolitical coherence (what is the US
doing there?), making it even more unpredictable. Syria is no longer simply
deluged by proxy militias pursuing obscure objectives; it has itself become a
proxy site for international tensions to play themselves out.

So
over the past week, two regional powers showed their hands (and anxiety) when
the Israeli and Iranian states openly confronted each other over their
objectives within Syria. Israel sent fighter planes into Syria to target what
it says are Iranian assets, which will be used to aid the Iran-backed
anti-Israel Shia militia, Hezbollah.

Iran then responded by shooting down an
Israeli fighter plane over Syria, and sending a drone into Israeli territory, a
move that prompted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accuse Iran of
‘putting a noose of terror around our neck’, before threatening what sounded
like war with Iran.

But
as destabilising as the Iran-v-Israel antagonism now being pursued through
Syria undoubtedly is, it is nothing compared to the warming cold war now being
fought in Syria between Russia and the US, who are, lest it be forgotten, still
the world’s two leading military superpowers.

Two weeks ago, an unofficial
Russian military force, said to be mercenaries working for Russian military
contractors Wagner, made a bid for control of a set of
oil facilitiesnear Deir Ezzor in north-eastern Syria. The
US-backed Syrian Defence Forces, consisting in the main of Kurdish military
units, responded with missile strikes and an airborne assault, as the Russian
forces tried to cross the Euphrates to the towns of Khusham and Salihiya.

Details are sketchy, with both US defense secretary Jim Mattis and Russian
officials opting for vague talk of rogue mercenary forces, although both
admitted that these ‘rogue’ forces were Russian.

Officially,
Russia has downplayed the incident, claiming only a handful of Russians died. But unofficial reports suggest that as many as 200 Russian soldiers (mercenary
or not) were killed, which, if true, makes this the most lethal face-off between
Russian and US forces since the end of the Cold War.

Indeed, whichever way it
is spun, it shows that the US and Russia are not simply trading PR blows on
social media, but real blows on Syrian territory. Despite the attempt to paint
it as a near accidental conflict between an independent military contractor and
US-backed forces, it seems likely that the Russian state was fully cognisant of
what the Wagner troops were doing.

As Bloomberg reports: ‘One of
[Wagner’s] leaders, Dmitry Utkin, is a former lieutenant colonel in Russia’s
military intelligence agency, the GRU. He and the firm have been closely tied
to the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef” because he owns the
Kremlin’s food-service providers.’

At one level, it shows how the collapse of the Syrian
state, initially in the midst of a popular revolt in 2011, and then in the face
of a US-led international assault on Assad, dragged in international actors to
pursue their own conflicting and, in the case of the US and the UK, uncertain
objectives.

So we now have a situation where Russia is seemingly deploying
non-state Russian forces to realise material and political objectives (the
seizure of oil facilities, and the stabilisation of the Assad regime); while
US-backed forces are pursuing their own ambitions – in this case, the
consolidation of SDF and, therefore Kurdish, gains, at the same time as
preventing Assad’s government forces from reasserting territorial control.

But,
at another level, we have something much more worrying going on: a blundering,
rather than a race, into a hot war between the US and Russia.

And it’s
blundering because, on the part of both the Trump and Putin administrations,
there seems little conscious appetite for a conflict. Hence Russia is fighting
in Syria using mercenaries – which allows for a degree of plausible deniability
when things go wrong – and Mattis is happy to back up the Russian state’s version
of events.

Moreover, Russia has not made a big deal of the loss of Russian
citizens. If it really wanted consciously to enter into open conflict with the
US, this incident would have been a good opportunity to do so.

But
the blundering has a twofold dimension.

First, America’s own use of
non-US-army, proxy forces in Syria makes their actions less planned, less
predictable. They can frequently, as many have done, pursue their own
objectives, even if that brings the US into conflict with, in this case, Russia.

And,
second, there is the broader anti-Russian mood among Western policymakers and
pundits, which frames events like this battle between Russian mercenaries and
US-backed forces in terms of Russian aggression and imperial ambition. So the
fact that the Russians killed were working for a military contractor is painted
as something deeply, deeply suspicious, complete with said contractor’s
connections to Russia’s supposedly gangster-like oligarchy.

Moreover, it is
proof once again, so the narrative runs, of just how deeply involved in Syria
Russia really is, of how it is Russia fuelling the conflict, of how it is
Russia fighting proxy battles on behalf of the supposedly
chemical-weapons-using Assad.

That
this is a misleading, one-sided narrative hardly needs to be said. But just
recall for one moment that not only has the US had a history of outsourcing
military responsibility to contractors, most infamously Blackwater; it has also
been outsourcing military responsibility in Syria to an array of dubious, often
Islamist militias.

The covert CIA-run programme, known as ‘Timber Sycamore’, which
then president Barack Obama approved in 2013, trained, armed and paid thousands
of insurgents who, more often than not, returned to Syria from America’s
Jordanian training bases to fight their own conflicts, sometimes arm in arm
with al-Qaeda affiliates.

Trump may have closed the programme in 2017 on the
grounds of its ineffectiveness – with an estimated $1billion spent – but its
impact continues to shape Syria in unpredictable ways. Russia may be using a
mercenary army to carry out certain strategic objectives, but the US has used
many mutually opposed mini-armies to carry out contradictory and unclear
objectives.

So,
the US, which entered the Syrian conflict long before Russia did, is still just
as deeply involved in Syria as Russia. But whereas Russia is at least pursuing
its own narrow, geopolitical interests, the US approach has lacked coherence
and purpose. And that makes it all the more dangerous.

Not just because the
groups that the US has backed are so numerous and divergent that they end up
fighting at cross purposes, prolonging and exacerbating the Syrian conflict.
But also because, in the absence of a clear strategic objective – and the
defeat of Assad is neither realistic nor rational – there is nothing to stop US
forces blundering into a hot war with Russia.

And this is something that becomes
ever more likely for as long as Russia is painted as the sinister, driving
force of the Syrian conflict, rather than one of those international players
sucked in by America’s initial intervention back in the summer of 2011. Russia
wants the stability of an Assad-ruled Syria. What exactly does the US want?